Political News from the US, the Philippines and Taiwan, Plus More Planet Discoveries

In the last few weeks, there have been quite a few interesting news items, some good, some not so good, but all worthy of talking about in some depth. Unfortunately, I’ve been too busy lately to do a lot of writing, so for now I’ll settle for a few quick comments on some of them.

In the US, it looks more and more like the US presidential election is going to come down to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump (aka Donald Drumpf). While Bernie Sanders is still in the race, looking at the math it is highly improbable that he could end up winning a majority of the pledged delegates, and if Clinton ends up with a majority of the pledged delegates (as she is almost certain to do), there is no reason for any of the superdelegates who support Clinton to change sides, and no justification for protests by Sanders supporters that the establishment (in the form of the superdelegates) somehow stole the nomination for Sanders. I do think Sanders should stay in the race until the primaries are over, but I hope he and his campaign will focus on policies, rather than attacking Clinton, and I hope Clinton will make an effort to win over Sanders’s followers (the open-minded ones at least) by taking even more strongly progressive stands. As for how Clinton compares to Trump, I’ve addressed the question some in previous posts, and I will no doubt do so again. But to put it succinctly, anyone who thinks that, whatever Clinton’s real or imagined flaws, Trump would be in any way a better president for anyone inside or outside the US other than Trump himself and a very narrow group of other people (e.g., those who would rather see the country collapse and the Earth overheat than have to live near Muslims, undocumented people or other “undesirables”) is either ignorant, delusional, somewhat lacking in intellectual capacity or, in the most charitable interpretation possible, not thinking clearly. Trump would be a disaster, and Clinton would be at worst adequate and possibly even excellent.

Speaking of terrible presidential candidates, the Philippines not only managed to elect one, but did so in a landslide. Former Davos city mayor Rodrigo Duterte is supposedly a socialist, so his economic policies at least shouldn’t blatantly favor the elite, but his complete and open disregard for human rights and the rule of law is appalling. He claims he will wipe out crime through summary execution of criminals (he claims to prefer hanging them), and considering his seeming support for virtual death squads as mayor, he is likely to at least try to do what he has said, no matter how many innocent people get killed by “mistake”. Then there was his utterly appalling rape joke, which alone should have been enough to turn off most reasonable voters. He even aimed a crude insult at Pope Francis. It’s no wonder he has been compared to Trump. Unfortunately, the Philippines is now stuck with him. While it’s tempting to say that they deserve him because they elected him, there were plenty of Filipinos who didn’t vote for him, and even some of those who did may come to regret it. Unfortunately, tough talk appeals to a lot of people, especially those who want simple solutions to complex problems – here in Taiwan that has manifested in the form of bizarre statements by all sorts of people in support of the death penalty, such as asserting that executing one particular criminal will somehow prevent random killings in the future, despite there being no evidence that the death penalty in general (let alone a single execution) has a significant deterrent effect.

Meanwhile in Taiwan, we're finally getting a new President, as Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party is taking office four months after her landslide election victory. This will be the first time since Japanese rule ended in 1945 that the KMT (the Kuomintang, i.e., the Chinese Nationalist Party that fled to Taiwan after losing power in China) controls neither the presidency or the legislature, as during the previous DPP administration of Chen Shui-bian, the KMT held a solid majority in the legislature, whereas this time the DPP won a solid majority. Of course China is not happy about this, since the DPP is more inclined to stand up to them on sovereignty issues, but hopefully Tsai will not bow to the pressure China is already attempting to exert. In any case, while it's fair to expect some improvement under Tsai, outside groups still have to keep an eye on the DPP to make sure it remains responsive to the public.

A more unequivocally positive piece of news was the announcement of 1284 new exoplanet discoveries. While we still haven’t found a true twin of Earth (i.e. a planet with a size and mass very similar to Earth’s orbiting a star like the Sun at a distance similar to that of Earth’s distance from the Sun), in part because the methods used make detecting such a planet difficult, we are finding more and more planets that are comparable to Earth, and some that at least theoretically could be habitable by life as we know it. What’s particularly amazing is the Kepler telescope that has made these discoveries focused on what it actually a very small slice of the Milky Way galaxy, so the actual number of planets in the entire galaxy is vastly greater. It’s easy to forget how truly huge the galaxy is. The number of stars that Kepler observed for evidence of planets is a tiny fraction of the total number in the Milky Way, and from what I can tell, even some of these parent stars of the newly discovered planets had never been specifically catalogued, despite the fact that they are for the most part relatively near to us (relatively being a key word here, as the distances are still vast). The huge number of stars in the galaxy, not to mention the huge number of galaxies in the universe, is why I am pretty sure that there is certainly some form of alien life out there somewhere. The problem, as I have observed in the past, is that intelligent life capable of creating a technological civilization (and not destroying it again relatively quickly through environmental degradation, war, or some other means) may still be extremely rare, and given the distances involved, our closest neighbors of that sort may be too far for us to find them anytime in the immediate future. But just by searching we will learn a lot, and I suspect that in the next half century or so we’ll at least have found strong evidence of life (though not necessarily intelligent life) on planets beyond our Solar System. That at least will be some consolation if things are not going well here – though we should do our best to ensure that is not the case, by preventing the Trumps and Dutertes of the world from getting too much power.